There's an entire industry of Bitcoin miners out there, people that set up specialized computer rigs to run 24 hours a day to mine the digital currency. Thanks to a 23-year-old kid from Brooklyn, this cottage industry is about to change. Yifu Guo, a digital media student on hiatus from NYU-Poly, has released the first batch of ASICs, which are chips custom-built to do one thing: mine Bitcoins. These ASICs are capable of mining Bitcoins at a far higher rate than is possible with common computer equipment — Guo's design, called the Avalon V1 , can mine Bitcoins about 50 times faster than a high-end rig, and offers a much more attractive price-to-performance ratio. ASICs also consume much less power than GPU-based machines, but they don't give miners the option to play the most demanding PC games. Being the first company to get this new technology into customers' hands is big...